Publication

The book has a complex publication history. Baum's first book publisher, Way & Williams, had planned to bring out the collection in 1898 under the title The King of Phunnyland, as the follow-up to Baum's moderately successful Mother Goose in Prose of the previous year. But Way & Williams went out of business before the book could be published. Baum shopped the book around to other publishers; the intervening success of his Father Goose in 1899 inspired New York publisher Robert Howard Russell to accept the project. Retitled A New Wonderland, it was handsomely produced, with 15 color plates and 100 black-and-white illustrations by Frank Ver Beck. Yet it was released in 1900, a month after The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and was overshadowed by the great success of that book. The Russell edition was not reprinted, and in time went out of print.

After Bobbs-Merrill became Baum's main publisher in 1902, that company acquired the rights to the book from Russell, and issued a new edition under the Magical Monarch of Mo title. This 1903 edition lacked four of the color plates of the first edition; the two editions also differed in their black-and-white illustrations, each containing some the other lacked. Baum dedicated Magical Monarch of Mo to his younger brother Henry Clay Baum.

In his personal correspondence, Baum identified The Magical Monarch of Mo as the first children's book he ever wrote, and dated it to 1896.